City of Tarrant

Profile narrative

The City of Tarrant is a municipal government located in the United States, specifically referenced as a small city in Alabama. It provides core municipal services that include public safety through its police department, administrative functions, record keeping, and essential computer services. The city’s information technology infrastructure is organized with separate servers for different municipal departments. External information technology contractors are responsible for managing the city’s infrastructure and performing system maintenance and repairs. The police department depends on its computer systems for filing incident reports and conducting record searches. Other municipal services continue to operate on independent servers that are not shared with the police department.

On February 10, 2025, the city experienced a ransomware attack that specifically targeted the police department’s computer system. City officials publicly stated that the municipality would not pay any ransom to the attackers. The city’s information technology contractors isolated the affected server, carried out necessary repairs, and restored service to prevent the ransomware from spreading to other departments. As a result of the incident, the police department temporarily reverted to filing paper police reports while record search functions remained operational. An early social media post claiming that all city systems had been shut down was later corrected by officials to reflect that the impact was isolated to the police department. An investigation into how the breach occurred is ongoing as the city restarts its systems, underscoring the city’s reliance on external IT support and its segmented server architecture as a factor that limited the incident’s scope.

Incidents

1 incident linked to this organisation.